I remember in 2008 sitting in the office of Abdel Monem Said Aly who
at the time was the director of the Al Ahram Center for Strategic
Studies when the subject of the Sinai came up. It was a few months' time
after Hamas had blown a hole in the wall that separates Gaza from the
Egyptian frontier, resulting in thousands of Palestinians rushing into
the Sinai to buy supplies and seek medical care. Abdel Monem was not
unmoved by the plight of the Palestinians, but he was clearly worried
about Egyptian security. He asked me what I thought would happen if a
Palestinian extremist group were able to infiltrate Israel from the
Sinai and carry out some sort of deadly attack. "How would Israel
respond?" Abdel Monem asked rhetorically. He knew that the Israelis
would respond, but how, where, and to what extent were unknowns that
clearly unsettled him. At one end of the escalation ladder, the
Israelis military might try to push into the Sinai much like the Israel
Defense Force's periodic advances in Lebanon or the Turkish military's
incursions into northern Iraq. This would no doubt put the Egypt-Israel
peace treaty and thus Egyptian security in jeopardy. Perhaps the
Israelis would use some other tactic, but either way this would create a
terrible security dilemma for Egypt's leaders. The Egyptians could
absorb the blow and be forced to confront additional opprobrium of their
people or they could respond and risk a conflict with Israel that they
would likely lose.

Abdel Monem later became the chairman of the board of the
government-controlled al Ahram Foundation and was thus by definition
part of the regime. He was pushed out of that lofty position after the
uprising, though he continues to have a column at the daily newspaper, al Ahram. Abdel Monem is a member of the widely detested felool--remnants--but
he was and still is a very good strategic analyst. Why the meditation
on a meeting that happened four years ago? You would never know it
from the msm, twitter, or anywhere else, but Abdel Monem's Sinai
scenarios could become a reality soon. On Wednesday, the IDF mobilized
six reserve battalions (an additional 16 were authorized and will be
mobilized, if necessary) as a precautionary measure given the potential
for instability in the Syria and Egypt to affect Israeli security.

This issue has been simmering for since last summer, but it seems to be heating up now. On April 24,the
Israeli prime minister called the Sinai the "Wild West." Netanyahu was
responding the bombing of the el Arish -Ashkelon pipeline--the
fourteenth--but Israel's concerns run deeper than a commercial deal that
is now in jeopardy. As I wrote last August, the Sinai is a haven for drug smuggling, human trafficking, gun running, and extremists of all types, ranging from Egyptian takfiris
and Palestinian jihadists to al Qaeda sympathizers. The obvious answer
to the problem of security in the Sinai is to deploy more Egyptian
forces in the area, a step that is subject to Israeli approval under the
Camp David Accords and the Egypt-Israel peace treaty. The Israelis
have actually been forward leaning on the issue, giving the Supreme
Council of the Armed Forces the green light for Operation Eagle last
summer and Israel's Defense Minister, Ehud Barak, signaled that
Jerusalem might be willing to revisit the restrictions on Egyptian
forces in the Sinai.

So if the problem is not necessarily the Israelis, what is it? In a
word, Egypt. The reason for Israel's mobilization is not only because
the IDF does not believe that the Egyptian armed forces are up to the
task of cleaning up the mess in the Sinai, but the Egyptian military
happens to share that view. By all measures, Operation Eagle failed and
the Egyptian have no capacity to plan and execute a sustained military
effort in the Sinai that would improve the security environment there.
As a result, Israeli leaders have clearly determined that if the next
rocket to land on Eilat kills someone, they are going to have to deal
with the problem themselves. The Israelis have every right to defend
themselves, but an Israeli attack on Egypt soil would not end well for
anyone. I guarantee it.

For I don't know how many months, I have been counseling policymakers
to take a "less is more" approach to post-Mubarak Egypt. The Sinai is
the one area where the opposite is the case. The peace treaty is a
pillar of U.S. policy in the Middle East and as a result, it is
incumbent upon Washington to do everything it can to mitigate anything
that could result in violence between Egypt and Israel. What's needed
now is a full-court diplomatic press. To start, the Multinational Force
Observers (MFO) contingent in the Sinai need to be bolstered
politically and Washington should grant it a higher profile in
coordinating between Israelis and Egyptians even if the IDF and the
Egyptian armed forces already enjoy pretty good military-to-military
relations. The MFO, a contingent of 1,656 personnel from 12 different
countries, is there to observe the peace treaty and ensure that no one
violates its terms. (As an aside, I am glad that no one listened to
Donald Rumsfeld in 2002 when he proposed withdrawing U.S. support and
personnel from the MFO in the Sinai. Of course, he didn't know that
Mubarak would fall and the durability of the Egypt-Israel peace treaty
would be thrown into question.)

Next, the United States should actually engage in some Sinai-related
contingency planning. I understand there are some pro forma scenarios
floating around, but no serious "what if" planning. I know the gears of
the U.S. government are not all that well-greased, but it is time to
get on it, as they say. Third, the President needs to send some trusted
additional advisors with good Egypt-Israel credentials out to Cairo and
Jerusalem for some extended hand holding. Ambassadors Anne Patterson
(Cairo) and Dan Shapiro (Tel Aviv) are extraordinarily talented and by
all measures they handled last August's violence along the Egypt-Israel
border with the kind of professional cool you want. It would, however,
signal the seriousness with which the United States takes this situation
if the president dispatched some envoys to bolster his ambassadors.
There is clearly mistrust between the United States and Israel, but that
does not mean Washington cannot work with the Israelis on something as
critically important as Sinai security and the maintenance of the peace
treaty. Remember, George H. W. Bush and Yitzhak Shamir could barely be
in the same room with each other, but the United States was able to
convince the Israelis of the strategic benefit of holding their fire in
the face of Saddam Hussein's Scud attacks in March 1991. Finally, the
United States needs to get down to business and help Egypt clean up the
Sinai. The Egyptians may be resistant and slow to alter their war
fighting doctrine, but it's in their long-terms interests to stabilize
the Sinai.

If the United States does not wake up to the danger that the Sinai
poses and the Israelis are forced to respond to a terrorist attack from
the Sinai, the Egypt-Israel peace treaty is over.

This article originally appeared at CFR.org, an Atlantic partner site.